Mozart meets the accordion and bandoneon? A rarity, perhaps! Richard Galliano finds, however, that the music of Mozart, as well as that of Bach, sounds especially beautiful on his favourite instrument…

Richard Galliano introduced me to violinist Jean-Marc Phillips-Varjabédian, a friend of Olivier Mantei who at that time was taking care of the music programming at the Bouffes du Nord Theatre. The idea was born to gather six musicians – five strings plus piano – and take Galliano’s Franco-Italian inspiration to put new life into Astor Piazzolla’s most beautiful pieces; fifteen years ago, those pieces were a long way from finding a home in most classical programmes….
Galliano and Piazzolla had met, and saying they appreciated each other is a real euphemism: love at first sight would be a better phrase! Piazzolla was no doubt the major encounter in Galliano’s career, but also part of his life, because he gave him some precious advice; and he still talks about it in interviews. So Jean-Marc and Sébastien Surel took their violins, plus Jean-Marc Apap (viola), Henri Demarquette (cello), Stéphane Logerot (double bass) and Hervé Sellin (piano), and they went off to take a breather down in the Aveyron region, together with the accordion. And so began an adventure whose size…. nobody at the time could see how important or how long it would be: almost 500 concerts around the world, and a DVD five or six years later that made this tango nuevo immortal, transfigured in the loving hands of Richard Galliano and his accordion, with silky, elegant arrangements so light that nobody had heard in a tango before.
The rest followed naturally: in parallel with his career in jazz, Galliano was finding a new taste for playing with a classical ensemble, a tendency that began with the Orchestra della Toscana and the Passatori album). Unlike a chamber or symphony group, however, a sextet allows for all kinds of daring initiatives: it is wildly clever. Adjustable, flexible and manageable, the format reduced to five strings allows you to do the groundwork quicker when you want to explore. The “Bach” project became the first album for Deutsche Grammophon, and it was an unexpected success. It was the accordion-performance of works by a “monument in classics”, and not only did it not cause a scandal, it seemed perfectly obvious.
And when Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” were raised, they quite naturally became the logical counterpart of the Piazzolla pieces that Richard and his sextet had played so often onstage.
“Mozart”, on the other hand, is quite another challenge, filled with other difficulties, and it requires extreme sensitivity. Here, other musicians have taken up the challenge, but the sextet keeps the same instrumentation: two violins, viola, cello and bass. This time, the first violin is Bertrand Cervera, a soloist at the Orchestre National de France, with support from Stéphane Hénoch (violin), Jean-Paul Minali-Bella (viola), Raphaël Perraud (cello) and bassist Sylvain Le Provost.